Ecosystems Curriculum
Section 6: Reinforcement Activities
Population Shuffle Game
In this game, each student represents an organism in an ecosystem. These organisms are divided into two teams, one that lives on land, and one that lives in the water. Each team consists of a primary producer, an herbivore and a carnivore. Each square on the game board represents a possible population size for each organism, and the goal of the game is to neither overpopulate nor go extinct. Players draw cards, which describe events in the ecosystem, such as a productive growing season, or pollution introduced by humans. These events trigger changes in the player's population size, which in turn trigger changes in the population sizes of the other organisms on that player's team, based on their predator-prey relationships. It is expected that this game will help students to understand the balance between populations of interdependent species in an ecosystem, and to see the results of large fluxes in those populations.
